Chapter Ten
Orders
Lara
Phillipe waited on the bench outside
the stables, his dappled gray saddled and ready to go. “Shall I
keep a discreet distance?” he asked as Lara stopped by him. “Or
would you like a ride?”
“I’ll walk, thank you. But
you needn’t keep your distance. Your company would be
welcome.”
“I’m glad somebody thinks
so.” He led his horse alongside her. “Talon was in no mood for it
this morning.”
Lara gave Phillipe a sideways glance
as they walked through the gate and onto the road. “Was Tal… the
captain angry when he left this morning?” she asked, dreading his
answer, yet needing to know.
“The man was in about as
foul a temper as I’ve ever seen him.”
Lara’s heart sank. The expression on
her face must have as well, because Phillipe reached out and laid a
brotherly hand on her shoulder.
“Maybe if you told me what
happened?”
A vision of her naked body pressed up
against the captain caused Lara’s cheeks to flush and Phillipe to
stare at her with raised brows. She shook her head as if she could
shake the shameful vision out and tried to remember what had passed
between them before. “I, ah, I asked him about the wildcat that has
cursed him.”
Phillipe raised his brow. “What did he
say?”
“That I should ask one of
my west-end witch cronies.” She eyed Phillipe. “What if I asked
you?”
He pressed his lips together and shook
his head. “I cannot. I’ve been sworn to silence upon pain of death
or dismemberment.”
Lara chuffed. She and Phillipe both
knew the threat would never be carried out. He was the captain’s
oldest and closest friend. “So which witch should I
ask?”
“Ask any one of them, I
would imagine they all know.”
Lara didn’t understand. Why was the
identity of this wildcat a secret only to her? Did the captain not
trust her to keep her tongue if asked? Hadn’t she been keeping her
tongue all this time the people of the valley had been calling her
his whore? She glanced at Phillipe, whom the captain had ordered to
keep watch over her while he was gone because he didn’t trust her
not to run away, which meant he didn’t trust her to keep her word.
She kicked a pebble with the toe of her sandal and sent it skidding
across the road.
“I wouldn’t worry over
much about Talon,” Phillipe said. “Whatever happened between you,
he’ll come around. The man is a great horseman and captain of men,
but he knows nothing of women.”
Lara let out an unladylike snort. “I
find that hard to believe.” She’d seen the way Ravenna and other
women in the valley looked at the captain. The way they looked
talking about him as they paid her good coin for vials of love
potion. All he had to do was drink one of their offerings, and he’d
be offered anything he wanted from any one of them.
“I’m not saying he hasn’t
known his share of women,” Phillipe continued, and her cheeks
flushed hotter. “Only that he doesn’t really know women.”
Lara swiped at her cheeks and eyed
Phillipe. “But you do.” It was more statement than
question.
“I am the middle child of
seven,” he told her. “With a brother and two sisters born before
and after me, and a mother, God rest her sainted soul, who ruled us
all, including my father, with a velvet fist.” He smiled, a little
sad and wistful. “Aye, lady, I know women better than most
men.”
“And the
captain?”
“Is the second of five
brothers, who watched his mother die in childbirth when he was a
stripling lad of eight years. And who, at the age of twelve, was
sent by his still-grieving father to the church to become a
priest.”
Lara felt keenly for the boy the
captain had been. She may never have known her mother, but she had
Sophie. “Does he remember his mother well?”
“He keeps the memory of
her close. Yet when he speaks of her, he speaks of her smile. Like
the sun beaming down on him. He says no other woman has ever smiled
at him like that, only a young girl in side braids with a sprinkle
of freckles across her nose.”
“He doesn’t speak of her
often, then?”
“His mother? Or the
girl?”
Lara gave Phillipe a look from beneath
leveled brows, which made him laugh.
“My sister, Evangeline,
could give that very same look,” he said. “And no, the captain
doesn’t speak of the girl or his mother often, rarely, in
fact.”
“I never knew my mother,”
Lara told him. “I think it would be much harder to have known her
and then to lose her at such a tender age.”
“My mother passed three
years ago.” Phillipe turned to a more somber tone. “When I was a
man fully grown and out of my family home over twelve years, and it
near did me in. Talon was a good friend to me through those dark
days.”
“I’m sure he was.” If Lara
had learned anything about the captain, it was how solid and
steadfast he was, stubbornly, maddeningly so at times. She’d also
learned more about the captain’s past in the last quarter league
than she had in the last thirty days, so as long as Phillipe
answered her questions, she would keep asking them. “How long was
the captain in the monastery?”
“Four years,” Phillipe
said, and Lara’s jaw dropped. “I know.” Phillipe laughed. “Can you
think of a least likely match between church and man?”
“Actually, I was thinking
he likely spoke Latin better than I.” She recalled the things she
and Sophie had spoken of in Latin in front of him, of their plan
for her escape from the bathing chamber. And then her thoughts went
to last night, how she’d pressed her naked body against his when
she should have pulled away. As he did.
Phillipe gave her shoulder a brotherly
squeeze. “I don’t know what happened between you two last night,
but I do know a smile of welcome from you when Talon returns, and
he’ll forgive you anything.”
Lara shook her head. “He was angry
when he left.”
“He’ll have three days to
cool off.” Phillipe wanted to make her feel better, she was sure,
yet his choice of words caused her body to flush from head to toes
at the tactile memory of the captain’s hard heat against her skin.
She almost tripped over nothing, and Phillipe grinned at her in a
way that wasn’t helping her recover her step or her composure,
though he did have the good graces to remain silent until she could
meet his gaze again. “I was thinking,” he said when she did. “Since
I’m to be your guardian shadow these next few days, how would you
like to learn to play Shah?”
“I’d like it very much.”
The game had interested her greatly the night he and the captain
had played in their chamber.
“Tonight then, after
supper. But for today, where am I to shadow you from?”
“You really don’t have to,
you know. I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
Phillipe wagged a finger at her. “But I would know. And if anything
happened to you, the captain would have my boll… head.”
It was useless to argue. The captain,
who obviously thought her too troublesome to behave herself, had
given his orders. “Since it’s well into the afternoon already, you
may shadow me at my home. At what was once my private
home.”
“I do
apologize.”
Lara laughed. She’d always liked
Phillipe, as little as she knew him, and the more she knew him, the
more she liked him. She eyed him with mock severity. “We’ll see if
Sophie even lets you in the door.”
Sophie not only let Phillipe in, but
after an afternoon of showing him around their property, she sent
him back to the keep with half a peach pie.
“Sustenance for Lara’s
Shah lesson tonight.” She grinned, and it earned a wink of his blue
eyes and a kiss on her weathered cheek.
The lesson went long into the night as
the game was complicated, but Phillipe was a good teacher and, he
said, Lara a quick learner. By the time the pie was eaten and
Phillipe said his good nights, the moon was high in the midnight
sky. Yawning, Lara gazed longingly at the captain’s bed, which was
so much larger and softer than her little cot. She circled it like
an unsprung trap, edging closer each pass until she picked up his
pillow and held it to her nose, breathing in the mingled scents of
sandalwood and rose, then tossed it onto the bed and plopped down
on her cot.
She dreamed of black and white knights
carved of stone and bone, chasing a woman of wood across a
checkered board. Then Lara was the woman, a woman of flesh and
blood, standing naked in the middle of a river with a knife in each
hand as a huge, black warhorse with ivory-boned tusks charged her.
A gloved hand grabbed her by the arm, jerking her off her feet and
pressing her to the hard breadth of a man’s armored chest, the
metal so cold it burned her skin.
She woke with a start, her heart
beating through her ribs. The first gray steaks of dawn lit the sky
through the open window, and Lara rose from her cot. She’d never
get back to sleep.
Phillipe waited for her outside the
stables after breakfast, and they walked to her house with Phillipe
leading his horse as they had yesterday. Sophie took advantage of
his presence and set them to thatching holes in the barn’s roof. It
was hard, hot, dusty work, but with Phillipe’s help and company,
the time passed quickly. And it kept Lara from constantly worrying
about the captain and all that had happened between them the night
before he’d left on his hunting trip.
After supper at the keep, Phillipe
walked Lara up to her and the captain’s chamber. They drank wine
and played Shah, and she managed to capture one of his black
knights before he took her white queen and king.
“Tomorrow night, then?”
Phillipe asked now they were done and he prepared to leave. “I’ll
give you a chance to capture both my knights.”
“The captain will be
back,” Lara reminded him.
“He can play winner next
time.” Phillipe threw her a wink and a grin.
Lara grinned back, looking forward to
it. Shah was a game of strategy and constant planning; she could
see why the captain liked it. If she’d learned anything about him,
it was that he seldom did anything without a plan. “I’ll bake
pies,” she told Phillipe. “Strawberry for the captain and peach for
you.”
She may not have known what she was
going to say to the captain when he returned, but she could bake
him his favorite pie. Sweeten his ear.
***
Lara marked the measuring string
around Patience’s belly and studied her friend’s face, noting the
deepening hollows of her freckled cheeks and the dark circles under
her eyes. “The babe is growing bigger whilst you are growing
thinner.”
“I did the same with
Wyatt.”
“No, you weren’t this thin
with Wyatt. Nor this tired.”
“I didn’t have a
three-year-old to chase after then.” Patience smiled indulgently as
her son burst into the house from his father’s workshop. Willem and
Phillipe had gone there to discuss Phillipe’s order for a saddle
with stirrups like the one Willem was making for the
captain.
“Papa said… Papa said
bwing him and Phiwip dwink, pease.” Each freckle on the lad’s
cheeks mirrored his mother’s, only somehow more chaotic as he
jumped in place. Lara beamed down at her godson.
“Tell Papa we’ll be right
out with their drinks, thank you,” Patience told Wyatt, who turned
a full circle and ran back out of the house.
Wolf looked up at Lara, tongue lolling
and tail wagging.
“Go.” She waved him off,
and the hound loped after Wyatt. Patience started to push herself
up off her stool. “You sit,” Lara ordered. “I’ll get the mead.” She
filled two cups from the pitcher on the kitchen table and set them
down on the small table beside Patience. “There’s something I want
to ask you.”
“Ask.” Patience offered a
quizzical brow. In all the years they’d known each other, they’d
rarely couched their questions. But that was part of Lara’s
problem: she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
“Lara?”
“Do, ah, do you know who
the captain’s wildcat is?”
Patience’s brows arched.
“Aye.”
“Is it… It isn’t Ravenna,
is it?”
“Ravenna?” Patience said
with a laugh. “No, it isn’t.”
“Oh.” Lara let her breath
out in a rush. “Good.”
“What made you think it’s
Ravenna?”
“She bought three vials of
love potion from Sophie and made sure to tell her all three were
meant for the captain.”
Patience flicked her hand
dismissively. “From what I know of the captain, he’d rather drink
the Black’s piss than a love potion from Ravenna.”
Lara dropped her jaw. “I can’t believe
you said that.”
Patience shrugged. “It’s the
truth.”
She eyed Lara and laughed again,
making Lara feel like a fool. She was acting like one too, not just
up and asking Patience who the wildcat was. Yet she was suddenly
skittish of hearing the answer. Maybe she was better off not
knowing. Besides, it really wasn’t her business. The captain and
his troop would be leaving the valley sooner or later, and she
would be staying here, unless she hadn’t paid off her debt and he
took her with him, in which case she should’ve been happy to sell
Ravenna a dozen vials of love potion, triple strength.
“Mama, Mama, Mama.” Wyatt
ran back in waving his arms in wild circles. “Capin’s here, Capin’s
here, an he bring Papa a buck wif big aners an Granmama peasants to
cook.”
“Peasants?” Patience
looked from Wyatt to Lara, who peered out the window to see the
captain’s two geldings tied to the post, one packing a buck and a
brace of birds.
“Pheasants,” she told
Patience, who shook her head with a giggle.
The captain stood with his back to the
house as Willem and Phillipe hoisted the buck from his horse and
laid it on the ground. He wore a vest of sleeveless leather over
his bare, tanned arms, and breeches that hugged his well-muscled
thighs, the length of which Lara could still feel pressed against
hers. Wyatt ran out of the house with Wolf on his heels, and the
captain turned and grinned at the lad and the hound, his teeth
white against the black of his beard. He looked wild and untamed: a
true hunter. He glanced over at the window Lara watched from, and
she sucked her belly in as he had his when she’d leaned in to him
and felt his hard heat against her nakedness.